


Love, written on canvass

by girl_wonder



Category: Harry Potter/Picture of Dorian Gray
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairing, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-04
Updated: 2005-11-04
Packaged: 2017-10-13 08:41:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She would write herself on canvass if it would make him love her again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love, written on canvass

  
  
  
  
**Entry tags:**   
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[crossover](http://girl-wonder.livejournal.com/tag/crossover), [fanfic](http://girl-wonder.livejournal.com/tag/fanfic), [harry potter](http://girl-wonder.livejournal.com/tag/harry%20potter)  
  
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_**FIC: HP/Picture of Dorian Gray: Love, written on canvass**_  
Title: Love, written on canvass  
Author: [](http://girl-wonder.livejournal.com/profile)[**girl_wonder**](http://girl-wonder.livejournal.com/)  
Fandoms: Harry Potter/Picture of Dorian Gray  
Pairing: Minerva/Dorian  
Warning: vague-ish HBP spoilers.  
Disclaimer: I don't own anyone at all.  
Written for [](http://laurus-nobilis.livejournal.com/profile)[**laurus_nobilis**](http://laurus-nobilis.livejournal.com/)'s request for some crossover love.

Summary: She would write herself on canvass if it would make him love her again.

Outside it was dark and she gazed out the window after putting down her book, thoughtful. He put a hand on her shoulder and she looked up, smiling with the light and beauty of youth. It was Paris, they were young. He was Dorian and she was Minerva and they were in love.

When she met Lord Henry, she knew instantly, the way that a midwife learns to know women's trouble, the way that sailors learn to know a storm.

"Don't," she said, futilely.

This is how strong Minerva was at twenty: someone was taking her lover away and she said, "don't."

Years later, she would find the painting of uncertain origins, and it was not the perfection that she remembered but it was so close that she allowed herself to trace the lips with familiarity.

She felt the spark of life, the taste of Dorian in the art and bought the painting on the spot. It arrived at her flat in butcher paper and she put it in her living room, leaning against a piano, still covered. She told him, because she could feel him under the paper, "I'll deal with you tomorrow."

The day that dawned was the first day of the Voldemort war. She immediately returned from her summer leave and joined the rest of the Order at Hogwarts. After the war, during which she lost so many friends, she had forgotten about the painting. When she got home, he had managed to remove the wrapping, but looked so sullen that she did what she had always done and said, "You look like you've just had a lemon."

Afterwards, she would remember that it was when the muggle painting changed, she knew that she might have problems. She put him up anyway, in one of the less used rooms. He pouted, though, and she could feel that through the walls, his feelings of abandonment, so she put him up in her study.

Carefully, she started talking to him, waiting for the day he would talk back. He didn't and she began to expect that, too.

After a time, she forgot that before she had bought him, she had given up on his love. His affection had been taken from her by Lord Henry, and oh, she ached for it back.

Her love for him had become the banked fire of nostalgia, something she touched on with affection. She knew because she had loved him and he had loved her that once she had more potential in her life than her new position as general in a children's war.

The piece of him, the piece of his soul, trapped inside art called to her with his voice. The tone twisted in her memory, as if his voice, always so pure in youth, had finally suffered the alteration of age. Sometimes she talked to him as if this was true, as if they had transitioned from the young couple in love to the old couple who knew each other with the familiarity of time.

For all of her fantasies, she had not once considered that he was truly alive, that he was there under her fingertips waiting for her, yearning for her with the same ardor of youth

*****

She was once beautiful, so beautiful, and he sees her reflection in his mirror and for the first time in his unreasonably long life is frightened.

*****

Can you love the whole of a painting, a gestalt of canvas, paint and color combined under the hands of genius?

Sometimes, she asks herself that, when she traces him with her fingers. How much of love is the way that she kisses her damaged fingers and presses them lightly against his lips, the most perfect lips that she has ever seen? After her hands grow old and sag with age, she only allows the very tips of her fingers to trace his perfection, not out of shame, but vanity. She does not want him to know how she has aged.

His eyes are still sightless and she presses her fingers to her lips and thinks, quietly, "yes."

It was raining on the day that she met Dorian and she remembers that he had no umbrella, just a coat, long and so fashionable that she passed him by without a second glance. He could not let that pass.

They met because she was a young witch with all the potential in the world. She was brilliant, she was golden, her hands did not know the work of decades yet to come. He was perfection, he was brilliance, he did not know of the cruelty that would consume his soul.

When they loved each other, they became radiant with their affection.

*****

Lord Henry came by for tea, and asked for the painting.

She told him, "No."

This is how strong Minerva was after that first long war: when someone tried to resurrect her lover, she said, "no."

Under her wand, Lord Henry walked out the door. "He would be just as perfect as he always was," Lord Henry said. Age had treated him worse than her, he looked old when he said it, the last disciple of beauty.

His worship was clear and he asked at her doorstep, for the first time, "May I see him?"

Minerva shut the door.

*****

When she touched Dorian for the last time, she forgot his flaws, just as she had the first time that they met.

"Tomorrow, I will destroy you, and destroy the last chance there is of returning you to flesh," she told him.

Inside the voice that she had come to think meant Dorian screamed. Tracing his lips with her fingers, she ignored it.

*****

end  



End file.
